Kurant Powers Merchants

Kurant Corp. is adding an application, VirtualApp, to StoreSense, its e-commerce infrastructure offering. Company officials said VirtualApp will give merchants transactional capabilitiesfast.

Kurant Corp. is adding an application, VirtualApp, to StoreSense, its e-commerce infrastructure offering. Company officials said VirtualApp will give merchants transactional capabilitiesfast.
The San Francisco-based company is partnering with SurePay LP, a subsidiary of First Data Corp., to offer VirtualApp, a paperless merchant account application and decisioning process.

Kurant will market VirtualApp to the 125 ISPs (Internet service providers) that have StoreSense, as well as to other regional ISPs, who will offer merchants near-instant access to payment capabilities.

The SurePay payment solution enables merchants to process online payments, including credit card transactions and check payments, via First Datas TeleCheck subsidiary and cash payments through First Datas Western Union retail agent.
Prior to such online offerings, a company that wanted an Internet presence and transactional capabilities had to go through an ISP and a financial institution. The merchant account request required a decisioning process that could take weeks and require manual administration for the merchant, the merchants bank and the ISP hosting the merchants store.
With VirtualApp, a merchant must still maintain relationships with an ISP and financial institution, but the new app winds those two ends tightly together by setting up the gateway and the merchant account.
VirtualApp is available now, and pricing varies. The price for StoreSense ranges from $25 to $900 a month, depending on what features are implemented. There is also a monthly and transaction-based combined pricing that boils down to $19.95 a month for the SurePay Gateway and a fee of 2.39 percent plus 30 cents per transaction.